ACT! & Personal Activities

We recently developed a summer training series for a customer, yes we do that too, and during that session a user asked, “what if I just want to schedule a dentist appointment? I don’t wanna enter my dentist, but I need the appointment on my calendar.” This is one of those things as a 12 year ACT! CC and user of ACT! since 1993 that I take for granted. It’s a great little tip, really.

One of the great things about ACT! is the relationship to the Contact. If you are new to ACT!, it’s something we long timers take for granted. Unlike PIMs (personal information managers, like Outlook or your Blackberry), in ACT! it’s about the Contact. If you schedule a Call, you schedule it with the person you are calling. This perpetuates the lifecycle of sales. Histories prompt follow up. Clearing Activities creates Histories. Documents get merged and attached to Contacts, and all the while these ACT! items are related to the Contact. That’s the ACT! experience. Everything in one place, related to your Customers and Prospects.

Of course, we encourage our users to keep everything in ACT!. If you looked at my calendar you’d see lacrosse games, blog writing, summer camps, proposal follow-ups, web demos, trainings (a custom Activity type in our ACT! database!), etc. Personal and business mixed together. I don’t keep my pediatrician, hair stylist and the like in my database. I could, but I keep them separate. I do schedule everything in ACT!. The trick is, schedule the personal stuff or tasks not related with a Contact – like writing the next blog post – with your My Record. The My Record is you in the database. Not sure if you have one? Every ACT! user does. To check yours, click Lookup, then My Record.

If you see someone other than yourself, you’ve given yourself a new identity. As fun as that sounds, you or someone has typed over your My Record instead of creating a new Contact. You’ll want to correct that, and enter your information on your My Record.

Then, next time you have an Activity not related to a business Contact, simply click the appropriate Activity icon, and choose “My Record” from the Schedule with drop down.

Activities scheduled against your My Record appear on your calendar, just like your other Activities. So juggling all you have to do is more concise. If everything is in one place, you are far more likely to find it. And hopefully in using ACT!, you’ll complete and accomplish more!